Zero Parades is a beautiful Disco Elysium follow-up, but not a very good spy game
29d 23h ago by piefed.world/u/Agent_Karyo in crpg from www.pcgamer.com
ZA/UM's espionage RPG doesn't quite sell its spy story.
I forget this is ZA/UM after the fired everyone that made Elysium awesome right?
It's... complicated. There are a couple of people with writing credits for Disco still at the studio, it's just that the major writers (Robert Kurvitz, Helen Hindpere, Argo Tuulik, Martin Luiga) aren't there anymore. Aleksandr Rostok (former art director and responsible for most - though not all - of the portraits in Disco Elysium) is not there anymore either. Anton Vill however (who drew the Thought Cabinet) is still there and seems to have had a major role in the visual design of Zero Parades.
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Yes thank you!
Having finally read this review now I have to say this is the best review of Zero Parades I've read so far - given that I've not played the full game myself, of course. I've seen so many other publications get swayed by the flash and the surface level and the impressively fancy words. This actually goes through the game thoroughly, and brings up many misgivings I've had with both the footage I've seen and the demo.
I found this bit particularly funny:
For a long while I really did try to roleplay someone who was trying to be covert and do espionage, even if I sucked at it. After 10 hours of clicking the most boring dialogue option when the writer's intent was clearly for me to choose between apology spy, commie spy or hedonist spy, I just gave in. At that point I was missing out by pretending that it mattered whether I spilled my deepest secrets to another side character—everything that mattered was signposted, and even those parts were generous with Hershel’s idiosyncrasies, accommodating her personality at the expense of her profession regardless of whether that made sense within the story.
They went so hard on thoughtlessly copying Disco Elysium that they managed to carry over some of that games own flaws. Definitely an impressive feat. It brings me back to an incredibly well-written response to the demo from a few months back, which says everything so well I don't feel the desire to add anything. But this one line in particular stands out:
Zero Parades might as well be the first videogame to ever be made with generative AI in spirit rather than in practice: an uncanny bundle of assets that seeks to supplant the original just by imitating it so closely you just might start to doubt your own senses.